An ethical person - like a politician, banker or lawyer - may know right from wrong, but unlike many of them, a moral person lives it. An Americanist first already knows that.
Bankers and their government agents will always act in their own best interests. Any residual benefit flowing down to the citizens by happenstance will just be litter.

Thursday, September 18, 2014

How The NSA Enabled Israel Military Intelligence To Politically Persecute Innocent Palestinians

from the a-huge-mess dept

Almost exactly a year ago, one of the many Snowden revelations came out, this time concerning the fact that the NSA was giving raw domestic communications data
to Israeli military intelligence. This was somewhat shocking, because
it basically was allowing Israeli intelligence to sift through
communications data (both metadata and actual communications), including
on Americans, without any restrictions. As was noted at the time:

Details of the intelligence-sharing agreement are laid out in a
memorandum of understanding between the NSA and its Israeli counterpart
that shows the US government handed over intercepted communications
likely to contain phone calls and emails of American citizens. The agreement places no legally binding limits on the use of the data by the Israelis.

The disclosure that the NSA agreed to provide raw intelligence data to a
foreign country contrasts with assurances from the Obama administration
that there are rigorous safeguards to protect the privacy of US
citizens caught in the dragnet. The intelligence community calls this
process "minimization", but the memorandum makes clear that the
information shared with the Israelis would be in its pre-minimized
state.

Among his most shocking discoveries, he told me, was the fact that the
N.S.A. was routinely passing along the private communications of
Americans to a large and very secretive Israeli military organization
known as Unit 8200. This transfer of intercepts, he said, included the
contents of the communications as well as metadata such as who was
calling whom.

Typically, when such sensitive information is transferred to another
country, it would first be “minimized,” meaning that names and other
personally identifiable information would be removed. But when sharing
with Israel, the N.S.A. evidently did not ensure that the data was
modified in this way.

Mr. Snowden stressed that the transfer of intercepts to Israel contained
the communications — email as well as phone calls — of countless Arab-
and Palestinian-Americans whose relatives in Israel and the Palestinian
territories could become targets based on the communications. “I think
that’s amazing,” he told me. “It’s one of the biggest abuses we’ve
seen.”

And, indeed, Bamford notes, it's now been more or less confirmed that
the information that NSA was sharing was used to persecute innocent
Palestinians. This is only coming out now because dozens of veterans of
the unit publicly called out the abuses and refused to continue to participate in the process:

It appears that Mr. Snowden’s fears were warranted. Last week, 43 veterans of Unit 8200 — many still serving in the reserves — accused the organization of startling abuses.
In a letter to their commanders, to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
and to the head of the Israeli army, they charged that Israel used
information collected against innocent Palestinians for “political
persecution.” In testimonies and interviews given to the media,
they specified that data were gathered on Palestinians’ sexual
orientations, infidelities, money problems, family medical conditions
and other private matters that could be used to coerce Palestinians into
becoming collaborators or create divisions in their society.

Everything about this is disturbing. There have long been concerns about
the NSA and other intelligence agencies using the information they have
access to try to coerce innocent people, threatening to embarrass them
or reveal secrets. Other Snowden documents have revealed that the NSA in
fact had plans on how to do something similar,
using things like the porn surfing habits of people they didn't like to
embarrass and discredit them -- even if they weren't part of any
terrorist organization. While the NSA insisted it never did such things,
this latest revelation suggests that the NSA clearly enabled the
Israelis to do exactly that -- often using communications and metadata
of Americans, handed over willy-nilly to the Israelis to do just that.
Meanwhile, kudos to the Israeli veterans for blowing the whistle on this kind of activity.view article